THE REAL PRESENCE

THE REAL PRESENCE

Flannery O’Connor, a popular Catholic novelist, recounted in a letter in 1955 her experience at a dinner party.  She felt that she did not have much to contribute to the conversion, feeling like she was out of her element.  However, later in the evening the subject of the Eucharist came up, and since she was the only Catholic in the group it was expected that she would defend it.  One of the ladies stated that she received the Host as a child but misunderstood it for the Holy Ghost.  She thought of it now as a pretty good symbol.  O’Connor writes that in response she said, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it!”  In the letter she explains: “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

Would that we would all have the faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as did Flannery O’Connor!  If you can live without the Eucharist, you are not really living.  Created in God’s image and likeness, we were born with a desire for God.  He created us in order that we might enter into communion with Him.  The supreme moment of that communion in this life is when we reverently receive him in Holy Communion.  Yes, there is symbolism in the celebration of the Mass, and the form of bread and wine that we receive are themselves signs of what is hidden, but the Eucharist is not a symbol.  It is what Jesus says it is.  There are two miracles which occur at the same time in every Mass.  When the priest speaks over the elements and says “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” the bread and the wine are transubstantiated into Christ’s Body and Blood.  At the same time, they retain the outward form of bread and wine.  The essence changes, the accidents remain.  In this way, the Holy Eucharist can be consumed by the People of God, and they must receive it by faith, not by sight (cf. 2 Cor 5:7)..

Everything that exists has an interior and outward existence, which Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy call substance and accident.  In a person or thing the substance does not change, but the accidents – what are observed and experienced – often do change.  For example, put water in a pot and it is liquid.  Place it on a lighted burner and it boils and becomes vapor.  Place it in the freezer and it becomes ice.  The accidents of the water change but it never stops being water.  The same is true of a human being.  She is a zygote in the womb of her mother; she is an infant when she is born; she grows up to be a young girl, then a woman, and eventually an elderly lady.  Her looks change dramatically along her journey from conception to old age, she grows in knowledge and experience, but she is always herself.  She is the same one, the same essence, the same person, the same soul.

The essence of something cannot be changed except by an act of God.  At the Last Supper, he who created the world by the spoken word – “Then God said…” – spoke to the unleavened bread, which he held in his hand, and to the wine, which he held in a chalice, and changed their essence while retaining their form.  When he instituted the Sacrament he said to the apostles, “This is my body which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.”  Then he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you” (Luke 22:19-20).  He did not say “this symbolizes my body” or “this symbolizes my blood,” but rather he said that this is the very Body and Blood which will be given for them on Calvary.  And they will do what he did, in remembrance of him.  They will speak over bread and wine and it will become his Body and Blood.

This is what Jesus taught, and what the Church believed from the beginning, and woe to us if we deny it.  “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.  For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:53-56).